The Story Behind Mint House: Pioneering a New Kind of Stay - Christian Lee, Mint House

Josiah: Tell me why you decided to spend this chapter of your career in hospitality. You have such a diverse background. You've worked all over the world. You've lived all over the world. And you spent most of your career working outside of hospitality. Why take this job in hospitality?

Christian: So there was a series of things that kind of led me to this. I'd say the first was beginning part of my career was all pretty large companies. So I came to New York, I worked in investment banking, then I worked at Time Warner, then went to Time Warner Cable and had a great experience there. I was part of the team that kind of took that company public. We spun it off from Time Warner. had a variety of roles. And then we ultimately sold the company to Charter in 2015. And at that time, I was really looking for more of a startup kind of growth type of company. And so I was honestly less focused on the industry and more focused on how do I… I had been at these large companies. I really enjoyed the experience. It was great. But I sort of felt like I wanted to be able to just build something a bit more, be involved in the creation of something. So I actually talked to a variety of companies at that time and got introduced to Adam at WeWork. It was still pretty small then, it was 200 people and 10 or 12 buildings, whatever it was. And it was just, wow, this is great. This is definitely not going to be a typical corporate experience. And it was not, you know, I saw kind of how both lessons that were very positive and, you know, sort of things not to do of how do you scale a physical business. And WeWork wasn't traditional hospitality, obviously, but there was a big piece of it of, OK, how do we take a grow physically in different cities, different countries? How do we bring a human element to something that hadn't had as much of a human element before the office space? How do you combine technology with real estate? And so thinking through all of those things, I went to Asia for three years with WeWork, came back, and actually through one of the early investors, we ran into each other again. We had worked together at Salomon Brothers very early on and said, hey, I'm invested in this company called Mint House. You should meet the founder. He's great. And so I just got to know them. And the role wasn't right at the time, but I was really fascinated by this idea of how do you take what's traditional residential hospitality, right? This idea like it was kind of mixing together a whole bunch of things. this experience people wanted of something like an Airbnb, right? When I travel, I don't initially want to have just a traditional hotel room. I want access to a kitchen. I want to be able to, you know, wash or dry, or I wanted to feel more like I'm living in the city than I'm just a tourist there. But with Airbnb comes a huge amount of inconsistency. As I always say, like the best experience I've ever had staying somewhere is an Airbnb and the worst experience I've ever had. Like literally, you know, we were driving up to this home we had rented with the family and The lady calls and she's like, oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you, my son lives in the basement. And you're like, what are you talking about? I'm bringing my family. And you're on the road, you're three hours into the drive. And so that's just difficult for people to deal with. And so this was like, well, look, it's all of those things that are great about what people want to stay, but it's a consistent experience. It's branded. There is someone there to take care of things when you need. You know what you're getting. That's such a cool concept. Role wasn't right at the time, but I stayed in touch with Will. I then went to a supply chain technology company that was sort of in the middle of all of the supply chain issues, like solving supermarketing problems. But then, you know, Will called me about a year ago and said, Hey, look, we're looking to bring in someone to be CEO here. It'd be great. I talked to the board and it really had just sort of been turning in my head of like this really interesting model of how you bring together kind of real estate and traditional multifamily real estate, hospitality, these huge trends in the world that people really want a different type of experience, first of all, when they travel, but also just even in their own city, right? You need this space on a short-term, long-term basis. So it all kind of came together. I just said, look, this is a really fascinating thing. I love a lot of stuff about it. Technology, real estate, hospitality. Here we are.

Josiah: Here we are. I want to touch on a few elements of that. Going back to your WeWork experience, you had a whole range of experiences there. Let's focus on some of the positive lessons you took away because I'm very interested in how are humans gathering and socializing and moving, especially people moving between cities. What are some of the learnings that you had during your time at WeWork around that?

Christian: So lessons from WeWork. I'd say one of the biggest was the way that people really, a couple of things. There's the consistency with an authentic local experience. We built spaces so that they had a similar set of things, right? You knew you had meeting rooms, you knew you had breakout rooms, you knew you had your dedicated office. There was all these things. There was a community manager there who was going to make the experience great for you, there to help out if you have questions or problems. But we also made them of the city or of the country they were in. And so they all had local artists who were involved. They all had whatever the local needs were. I mean, silly things like tea in certain places versus coffee or different types of events that would be more relevant in different types of cities or countries, whatever it happened to be. And so really that mix of how do you make something that's consistent, that has sort of a set of standards associated with it, but also is very local and authentic to the place that it is. And I think that's been one of the things that we think a lot about at Mint House. I always talk about we don't necessarily have to have a set of colors that we use everywhere or the same chair that we use in every single, you know, you don't have to be able to like open your eyes in a room and say, ah, I'm in a Mint House. What you should do, though, is know that there's a certain set of expectations. When you come to a Mint House, I'm going to have a kitchen and a washer dryer. I'm going to have the functionality of all these things. it's going to be somewhat elevated premium experience, right? I'm going to have the comforts of home, but the consistency of a hotel. And so there's some level of consistency, but we're not trying to make every room look exactly the same, right? We're trying to have it be of the city that it's in, right? Reflective of the building it's in. There's a language of cities and buildings that we want reflected when you stay. So again, it feels like you're staying in DC or New York or Nashville or someplace else with still a consistency to it that I think makes that experience better.

Josiah: That's helpful. And as a WeWork customer I feel this myself, you know, I'm based in San Francisco. I typically work out of locations there, but I'm here in New York. I was actually working for a place a couple blocks away from here, felt very New York when I'm in London. I feel like especially traveling for business, there's a certain amount of consistency because you're there to do things. And you, especially in the business travel, you almost need the background to kind of fade into the background, like, it's all about the purpose of the travel and it's knowing your customer, right? You also mentioned talking with the board. You have a great board here at Mint House. And I'm curious, as somebody coming from outside of hospitality, you're considering the job here, you're talking to the board. What stood out to you in those conversations with the board about how they were thinking about hospitality?

Christian: I want to go back to one thing you said that it is a great board and that is definitively true. It's one of the best boards I've ever worked with and it's a really interesting mix because it's a growth company that has venture investors in it. So there are venture investors on the board. At the same time, the board has been very intentional about bringing in people who have deep hospitality and operational expertise. So the former CEO of Four Seasons is on our board. The former COO of Equinox is on our board. And so we have these people who have investment kind of growth experience. How do you scale something? What are the lessons you can use to provide leverage to get scale as we grow the organization, right? The goal is to expand the brand, into more cities and across the country. At the same time, we have a deep set of operational expertise of like, this is what Four Seasons did. This is how we scale. These are the way we looked at the problems. This is what Equinox thought about. I mean, Equinox is such a great story of taking something that people used to pay 50 bucks a month for, and now they pay 300 bucks a month for it because It's an elevated experience. It's the same treadmill and the same weights, but it's everything around it that makes it so cool, makes it so welcoming. It's the hospitality piece, bringing kind of hospitality to a gym experience, which no one had really done at scale before Equinox. And so just talking to all of them is so exciting because I get to bounce ideas off of, OK, where do we invest? How do we grow? At the same time, how do we think about what our brand should stand for? How do we think about how do we have consistency but still be local in the markets we're in? And so all of that, we were just very much aligned on the things that were possible for this type of brand going forward. So that was super interesting.

Josiah: I love it. I feel like in hospitality, at least, there's not really a lot of conversation around the board makeup and even where you decide to take capital, right? And those are huge drivers in terms of what you're able to do. So it's cool to hear that. You touched on this a little bit early in our conversation, but I want to come back to Mint House. I'd love to talk about the product a little bit more if we could. And then also about the business model, because there's some really interesting aspects. Maybe let's talk first about the product. And so you're referencing some elements of this, but maybe let's spend a couple of minutes talking a little bit more about what you have and how you create properties.

Christian: Yeah, for sure. So at the core, we are working with multifamily residential owners in urban markets. That's kind of what we do. And we've been pretty focused on that and we plan to stay pretty focused on that. And there's others who have taken a more diffuse approach to kind of going after short-term rental, but we're saying we're multifamily, residential in urban markets, and that's the sort of consistency of what you should expect. So from there, we think that over years of experience that there's some level of scale required to make this work, scale in a building, scale in a city. kind of a minimum of 20 to 30 units. The building we're in right now, 70 Pine, we have 165 units here that we manage as dedicated Mint House, but that level of scale. And there's differences between different buildings. If we have 20 units in a building, there may not be 24-7 staff there, but there'll be someone in the building who's available, certainly during working hours, there's a cleaning staff who helps either on a part-time or full-time basis. And so there's an operating model piece to it. Others are 24-7, like a typical hotel. But then when you get to the room, again, it should feel like a home. You have an elevated design. We're not competing against the most luxury Aman at $30,000 a night, as the New York Post talked about in the latest article there. It is premium. It is an elevated experience. And again, it has all of those features that you want. So if you're there for a night or three or four nights, and maybe you're working. hey, you don't want to go out to dinner every single night. Or maybe you want to make your own breakfast one day. You can do that because you have that. You don't want to bring all your clothes. You have a washer dryer. Maybe you're traveling with kids. You have all of that there. You need to do a work from home for part of the day. So you have a desk. You have at least someplace you can work from. And so there's all this sort of functionality that comes together in it that makes it sort of like a great place to stay, but also just a great place to be. And so as all of that comes together, it's sort of that holistic Mint House experience.

Josiah: Tell me a little bit about who your ideal customer is and the problem that you're looking to solve for them.

Christian: Yeah, so I think of it in kind of three big buckets. The first is kind of the traditional leisure travel person, whether that's Nashville, where we have families coming in or bachelorette parties, we're opening up in Washington, DC, lots of families coming there. It's very close to the White House, our location. So families coming to see it. And so, you know, there's a huge market where it's like, look, they need the functionality, as I said, kind of of that home of that Airbnb style place to stay. But they want the consistency of knowing what they're getting when they come in the door, right? So they need all this functionality. They want that elevated experience, but it needs to be consistent. So that's a big market for us. The other is corporate. What we're seeing now is, first of all, a sort of significant return to business travel. But one of the big differences is people are generally going for a bit longer now, right? Where it used to be just kind of get in and out and I'm back home. Now with remote work, maybe distributed work teams, someone's saying, hey, I'm going to come down, but I'm going to come down for three or four days because I haven't seen that team in a long time. And so I'm going to go down, we'll spend a couple of days of sort of bringing people in from parts of the country. And so that almost creates a different type of solution that you need from the place you're staying, right? Again, maybe you're going to sort of want to make your own meal. Maybe you want to have people come over and hang out in your living room. And so you have a separate bedroom and a living room, so it's not so awkward to come into a hotel room. Maybe you have these different needs that you have when you're coming and staying for a longer period of time. We have event spaces in many of our hotels, so you can host it there, have people stay directly on property. And then the third big bucket is what I'd call sort of the other. And this is a super interesting category. It's one of the big things kind of starting in COVID and even after was traveling nurses, right? So, they want to be able to go to different cities. They need a place to stay, but again, they want that feeling of home, but the consistency. There's a big bucket I'd call change of life. So one of the things is people who've recently gotten divorced and they need to move out quickly. They don't want to go sign a 12-month lease, but they also don't want to move into someone else's home. So this can feel like your home, but it's not the sort of long-term commitment that you need to make. Maybe you're buying a home and you just sold your other home and there's a space in between. Maybe something happened and there's a flood in your basement, right? So there's this sort of big, even for people in a city, it's this great short-term solution that is, again, consistent and elevated, but doesn't have to be a long-term commitment. And so you have sort of a variety of these use cases in what I'd call the other that are pretty interesting. And so the way I think about bringing all of this together is Again, I'll just use Nashville because it's a market we're expanding in a lot. You've got Amazon, you've got healthcare companies there. They're coming in during the week. You've got people visiting for the Country Music Hall of Fame, the bachelorette parties, whatever it is on the weekends. Then you have this base of people who are there for a long-term basis. We think about building that portfolio within the different buildings that we have.

Josiah: It's interesting to hear about those different lines of business. And I feel like I have been, you know, for most of my life as a pretty diehard traditional hotel fan, but I've noticed over the past couple of years, myself evolving kind of in the direction. So I've been here in New York for a week and with my wife and she has an office. I'm working on a, we work and we have space to work, but there's some days, even though this is, you know, gotta be the capital of the world in terms of restaurants and things like that. Sometimes you just want to try making a breakfast for yourself or something like that, right? Totally. or you want to take a meeting or something. And so it's interesting to kind of feel this personally, but also some of the, you know, sort of meta trends happening around how people want to live and move around cities. And we're so connected and we're so global. It's a big opportunity, it feels. Yeah. Look, I mean, we, you know, again,

Christian: You don't want to make your own experience kind of applicable to everyone, but for us, so I've got 14 and 12-year-old boys, definitely now, but even earlier. When we travel, just going to a traditional hotel is difficult because, again, they get stuff all over their clothes and I got to clean it all the time. Maybe we don't want to go down and spend $50 on the hotel buffet and we just want to cook some breakfast. My boys actually both love to cook. Sometimes we want to go for meals, but sometimes we've had a long day of doing whatever it is, sightseeing, skiing, whatever we happen to be. And it's like, look, we just want to come home and cook a meal and just hang out and chill for a little bit. Maybe everyone wants to go back to their own room and not all be crammed into one hotel room. And so those types of things, I just think, make it so much easier to travel, whether it's just, you know, with your partner, whether it's with your family, even just by yourself, having that optionality is huge.

Josiah: The other thing that's interesting to me is, I am very interested in these innovative product types within hospitality. I think I do approach them with a little bit of skepticism, just in the sense that I've spent most of my career in technology, and I am intrigued by a technology-forward experience. But I'm also curious, how do you retain the human element? Actually, I just walked up to the front desk a few minutes ago. Two very warm individuals got to chatting with them. I felt welcomed as a human walking through the doors. Then, you also have the product here that you've explained that is interesting. That is reflected in some phenomenal guest reviews, if you look across your review set of choice. It's clear people like this. I want to talk about a different audience. I want to talk about, what is the pitch to owners or developers or people with the real estate? Obviously, multifamily has been a darling in the commercial real estate investment community over the past couple of years through COVID. It's a very strong asset class. What's the case for turning it into a hospitality concept, into a mint house?

Christian: Great. I'll touch on the first point quickly, because I think it's kind of core to what we do, and then I'll talk about the multifamily piece. That is very intentional for Mint House. So different people want different things, and we need to be able to respond to that. And so we have built the technology that allows you to do self-check-in. You can kind of do everything on your phone. If you want to just come in, go straight to your room, not talk to anyone, You can do that, right? That is all exist. It's there. We actually allow you to order, you know, what we call stock your stay. So have some groceries brought to your room that can be there waiting for you. Maybe you want a glass of wine. Maybe you want your favorite bottle of water, whatever it is. You can do that in a totally touchless technology driven way. But we also have a call center that if you have a question, you can call. We also have people at the property that are available. And so because we have so much technology that helps us to run efficiently and do things the way you want to do it, but we also then can invest to make sure that there's still that hospitality piece to it. There's still someone there. And so that's really core to what we do. And it's something we think is very important. And it's why we think it's important to have scale in buildings. So that leaves me the second question of multi-family, right? How do we talk to those landlords? How do we convince people that this is a good use of their space? So the first is when you look at it, multi-family has been a great asset, right? As you say, these 12-month leases. The truth is right now, there's been a lot of multi-families delivered, especially in kind of different sort of COVID markets, whether that's Nashville or Texas, or just kind of go wherever you want to be. The rents that everyone had been kind of projecting this, and now you're starting for the first time to see them flatline a little bit, or maybe even go down. At the same time, you still see hotel prices quite high. And because hotel had been a bit out of favor, there hasn't been a lot of development in hotels, right? So you sort of have the same kind of group of hotels that are there. I mean, again, the same room types are the same stuff, some of which are lovely, some of which you want a different experience. So as we go in, we say, look, just the pure math of it. When you look at what we can generate on a per night basis, from that group of the sort of three big groups that I've talked about, right? That long-term base, the corporate travel, the transient, more leisure-type guest. You can just generate a lot more on a per-night basis from hospitality than you can from the multifamily. And even when you take into account the cleaning or whatever, because we're so technology-enabled, we can run this and generate higher net operating income for the multifamily owner than they can on their own. And you say to yourself, okay, well, why couldn't they just do it by listing on Airbnb? And the reality is it's a pretty complex operational business, right? There's a whole bunch of distribution you have to be on, right? You have to be on every OTA, you have to be on Airbnb, VRBO, all the platforms. You also need some direct sales force, right? We're sort of talking directly to Amazon, to Jane Street, to all these different companies about their needs, they need interns, they need corporate travel, they have meetings, they have events. So we're bringing that together with a national sales force. And you have to be able to bill for it, market it, the technology piece, all of those things come together. And what we tell owners is, look, we can bring that all to you. We'll do it on a management agreement. And so we'll take an X percent fee off the top, X percent fee off the bottom. We'll manage all of this. And it looks very much like a hotel management agreement, but in multifamily. And what they see is that when they sort of, the cash that gets flowed to them is sort of generating a higher NOI than they can just on multifamily, especially in an environment where rents are flatlining a little bit. The other thing we used to get early on was, well, wait, I have these types of people staying in my residential building. Do they really want short-term rental people in? That used to be a question we got. We really haven't gotten it as much recently. And partly I'd say there's two things that happen. Number one, as I said, we tend to be more premium and more elevated. So the type of guests we're bringing in tend to be a bit more conscientious of what's around them. Not to say we never have issues because we do on very small occasions, but we handle them professionally. There's a team who is there, but again, it's an elevated guest and we have noise And that noise cancelling, noise aware, like machines basically tell us if it gets above a certain decibels, right? So we can start to say, hey, you know, please keep it down. These are kind of the rules. So we can both like we bring in an elevated sort of set of guests. And we also have ways to check on this to make sure that everyone is working in the space well together. The other thing is we can offer benefits to the residents of the building. Think about Four Seasons Hotel and Four Seasons Residence or Waldorf Hotel and Waldorf Residence where you can get access to the cleaning staff that we have. If you have guests coming and staying for a night or a weekend, you can get discounted rates at the Mint House so they can actually stay in your same building. There's these things that we can build in. We can run fun, happy hours together with our guests and with the residents of the building. And so finding ways to sort of drive more harmony with the residents and the owners of the building. And that's been a big part of our being able to sort of be in these buildings and really sort of coexist very well.

Josiah: I feel that this is going to be really, really interesting to watch. You talked about Equinox expanding share of wallet. I'm very fascinated by fresh creative concepts like you're building, doing the same in hospitality, right? And maybe unlocking new segments of people that haven't traditionally stayed at a hotel. and creating new opportunities. You talk about the operational complexity of the business, and we could get into the details of that, but I feel like what is unique among other hospitality leaders that you're bringing to the table is running major business units and then companies outside of hospitality, and it seems that a constant thread there has been how you think about corporate strategy and where you take the company. My question for you is, what capabilities are you developing organizationally that you think are different from other hospitality brands that is giving you and edge today and will in the future? Right.

Christian: Yeah, that's a great question. So I'd say, putting myself aside for a second, when I got here, one of the things that's so great about Mint House is how motivated and passionate the team is. Many of the employees that we have, like at the property level, who work at a market level or more nationally, come from hospitality. So they've been part of this industry for 20, 30 years. They all recognize, again, the value and the benefits of it, but all the things that can be better. And so there's this real passion. If you go talk to our employees downstairs, if you go travel different markets and just talk to them and say, what's it like working at Mint House? What are you excited about? They've got all sorts of different answers, but you'll see passion. You'll see this idea that, look, there is this whole new way of providing this hospitality service, this whole new model, and people love it. They get excited about the NPS scores. They get excited about the guest experience being so amazing when people are coming in. Look at traditional hospitality and the churn rates are so high, it's so hard to keep anyone, it's so hard to attract people. Again, the reality is because we have this, because our guests are excited, because we're excited, our investors are excited, because of the different experience that we're offering, all of our employees are really excited about this. And I think that's something that is sort of like foundationally different, right? That level of excitement is palpable. If you're a guest, if you're a landlord, whatever it is, you sort of sense that and feel that. So that had nothing to do with me. That was just like, hey, this new idea, I want to be a part of that. They're coming here for a very specific reason. From there, then we can start to talk about, okay, look, what's different about us than maybe another short-term rental operator or sort of other companies in the space? Again, we've been focused on this premium multifamily. So we know where we're going. We know what types of buildings work for us. We're going deeper into the markets that are working well. And I think our employees understand that we're building something here that can really scale over time. And so that focus is also important, that ability to have a clear sense, okay, who's coming into the space? How are we working with landlord partners, right? That engagement's also very interesting. And so I think those things have been very helpful for how we have sort of both engaged our employee base and how that translates to the guest experience itself.

Josiah: I love it. You know, one of the things that caught my attention that you and your team have done was the Mint Pass. We could talk about that, or we could talk about just broadly, I'm very curious how you're looking at expanding either ShareWallet or unlocking new segments of people to become customers of yours that maybe traditionally haven't been hotel customers.

Christian: Yeah. So we can talk about both. I'd say on the second one, one of the things that I've really seen for us is, and we were talking a bit about this before we sat down, was, I don't know if you listened to Scott Galloway at all, Professor Prof G, his whole rant, which I very much agree with, that Google is a big tax on every business, right? And so all the hospitality companies are spending however many tens of millions of dollars, just sort of like getting to a baseline, paying Google for whatever search rank, right? What's clear is we're not going to win that war, right? We don't have the, I mean, what Hilton or Marriott spend on performance marketing is like bigger than our entire company. So we're not going to win a war of spending the most on Google AdWords, right? So we're not going to attract people that way. So how do we get people? Well, number one, I always say our best marketing tool is the buildings themselves. So whatever channel we're getting people in, get them into the building. So many people are like, I never knew this existed. I've never seen this. The repeat rates are really high. Because once you've tried it, you're like, this is awesome. basically the same price as a hotel, but a much better value. This is incredible. It's beautiful. It's elevated. It's all of those things. And then the other thing is that our product is so valuable because of the functionality of it. Again, it's that elevated design. We try to have personalization through technology, but Again, I can travel with my family. I have access to all these things. I can, you know, I can be there for work and be sort of doing some work there as well as whatever I need to do in the office. And so that elevated functionality is super important. And so video is super important for us, right? How do we show people, not tell them, right? No matter how much you and I talk about this, like I can explain all the things, but if I can just show you like a 30 second video of like, this is what you can do in a mental, you're like, ah, I get it. Right. And so like, how do we create that kind of organic social video experiences. I look like this is what it is. This is how you can use it. And I think we're just starting to do that. And I think that'll have a huge impact. And, you know, the thing on that is it's such a different world now, right? You and I can be sitting here talking with, you know, a video set up and some microphones, like the same thing is true for our teams kind of showcasing the properties. You don't need a massive, you know, sort of whole organization to come in with massive cameras and all that stuff. My 14-year-old could go down with a camera, take some videos for TikTok, show the way that we use it. Hey, pre-gaming before the Rays game in Tampa Bay. Hey, I'm here getting ready for the Taylor Swift concert in Nashville, sitting at a Mint House. Here is, hey, we're having some appetizers. We're going to come back afterwards. We're having a little like get together in this room. And so that I think is a big part of how we're going to differentiate and sort of show people what is so different about Mint House and why it's such a unique experience.

Josiah: I feel like this is actually a really good thread back to what you're talking about, building excitement internally, right? And what you've shared around the importance of product, of the buildings, right? Because this becomes marketing. That is the best marketing, right? You're creating something worth talking about, but it takes a lot of work, right? In a sense, it's harder to do that than just buy a bunch of Google ads. right? To create something actually worth talking about. But whether it's your teams, you have to instill this sense as the company leader that we're doing things together. We're going places. We're excited by this. And then for your guests, you have to create an environment that is worth sharing, right? So I love it. I love it. I'm curious, you're looking at a lot of different aspects of the business, hospitality, cultural trends, What are you thinking about these days or tracking or fascinated by recently that is on your radar? I'm curious what's on your mind these days.

Christian: Yeah, well, I mean, I'm going to put aside all the geopolitics in the world that I sort of spend a lot of time thinking about. And that is not a topic for this podcast, a different podcast, but I do have a lot of thoughts on that. I would say in sort of the hospitality world or in the kind of design world in general, there's two things that are very interesting to me. There was a great article in, I think, the New York Times three or four days ago about Barnes and Noble. the resurgence or rebirth of Barnes & Noble, and the whole thing was about their design. Barnes & Noble was the prototypical green floors and they had specific colors and everything looked exactly the same no matter where you were. And their new model is just let the store be the store. Whatever comes out, whatever's meant to be in that building, whatever makes sense, that's what we'll have it look like. It's very flexible, they can move things around. And so there's not a Barnes and Noble kind of like set of colors. And I think, again, it goes back to what I was talking about before, this idea that people want something a bit more authentic now. They're not looking for like, oh, this is the red and the blue and the chair. And it's like, no, like let the sort of building and the city and the space kind of tell you what's supposed to be there and just make it authentic. People want that sense of place when they go somewhere. So that's, I think, really interesting. I think you'll see a lot more of that. And just in sort of like, in general, whether it's retail, hospitality, residential, whatever it is, that notion of how can we incorporate the sense of place more in the design and the use and feel of the building. The other is loyalty. A friend of mine just wrote an article about this and I think it's really thoughtful around the traditional loyalty programs, right? You know, sort of the airlines, the hotels are all about, okay, accumulating miles or points. And it kind of was incredible innovation when it came out, but it sort of feels very formulaic, right? And I'm a big Delta customer. love Delta, love this sort of LaGuardia airport, right? I mean, amazing stuff, but their change to their miles program, clearly that caused a huge kerfuffle, right? And I think people are saying like, wait, I'm just trying to get these points. What does it actually get me? And I think the idea of loyalty is shifting more to like experience. I've thought for a while that one of the brand campaigns I want to do is like, hey, you have all these Hilton points or Marriott points or whatever. Congratulations, you just spent a million points and you've got a room that's as nice as our base level room. What are you really getting for all these things? Yes, it's cool to say I have a bazillion miles, but at some point you don't really care. So what I want to think about is how do we like when you come and you're a valued guest, we know that you ordered that bottle of wine to your room on the stock your stay last time. So let's have it there. If you've come, you know, if you're a regular guest, we know that you like your temperature set at 65 because it's all IOT sensors and we can know how you, or maybe you have the ability to set the preference before you even get there. How can we make it personalized for you? And that the loyalty is really like, it just feels more and more like coming home, right? It's more and more, it's less about, oh, how can I get this many points or get this many whatever that you probably never even actually use, but how can it just feel better and better when you show up? How can we just treat you more and more like, hey, yeah, you're family, you're home here now through the ways that we sort of know about you. So I think those two things are really interesting to me. And sort of really speak to the future of where we want the brand and Mint House to go into the future.